Charlotte Higgins's piece on architect Zaha Hadid's bespoke Bach pavilion for the Manchester International Festival got me thinking. Hadid has come up with a fabulous design, which will create a unique musical experience for those 192 lucky listeners who will have the chance to hear pianist Piotr Anderszewski inaugurate this lycra-clad, baguette-cleaned structure at the Manchester Art Gallery on Friday. But the idea of designing a space-within-a-space for a specific musical project is not a first for a major international architect. The most famous is probably pavilion that Iannis Xenakis designed for Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.

But there have been others. In 1984, Italian composer Luigi Nono's Prometeo – an unclassifiable work that he called a "tragedy of listening" - was premiered in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. But the audience weren't sitting in pews, chairs, or even pulpits. Instead, Renzo Piano had designed and built a wooden ark that fitted inside the church, which contained and amplified Nono's multi-dimensional soundworld, its mix of singers, electronics, and instrumentalists, who performed from positions all around the audience. The ark was one of the beautiful and ambitious structures ever built for music, the sweeping curves of its massive wooden pillars, the elegance of its internal geometry, the burnished colour of the wood. And it was more than just an enclosure for Prometeo. The ark was part of the spatial conception of the work, as central to Nono's soundworld as a resonating chamber is to the sound of the violin.

But the ark was only seen in two runs of Prometeo: the premiere in Venice, and performances of the revised version a year later in Milan; both performances were conducted by Claudio Abbado. Prometeo was given its belated British premiere at the Royal Festival Hall last year – without the ark. I talked to Renzo Piano just before the performance (he's in London a lot at the moment to oversee construction of The Shard, his 72-storey building near London Bridge), and it was clear how important the structure was to the identity of Prometeo, and to Nono's conception of the piece. Arguably, every performance of Prometeo without the ark can only be a partial realisation of the work, whatever the genius of André Richard, who has masterminded the sound projection of Prometeo at all of its performances since Nono's death in 1990.

So what of the ark? Why couldn't it be reconstructed in London? Piano told me the story: as it was so expensive to transport around Europe, the ark languished in pieces in the vaults of La Scala until the mayor of a town near Milan made an offer to take it off the opera house's hands, and use it as a regular auditorium. But after he bought it, his plans came to nought, and Piano says that today, the structure rots in a warehouse somewhere in northern Italy. It's a small tragedy of music and architecture that Prometeo can never be performed today as Nono and Piano intended it. Hadid's structure for Manchester is designed to be temporary, but even so, I hope it's destined for a more fitting fate than Piano's ark.